Describing wine in words: how can we do better?

By Jamie Goode | 21st March 2023

One thing we do frequently in the wine trade is describing our perception of wine in words. It’s actually quite a strange thing to do, but we have become familiar with it, and generally don’t question it. In fact, a lot of my work revolves around trying to describe wines in words.

But, the truth is that I hate tasting notes. They are usually so bad. And it’s so hard to write good ones. Now normally when a writer says this sort of thing they are actually saying that everyone else writes bad tasting notes, but they write great ones, and you should follow them and not everyone else. This is not what I am trying to say. I try to do my best, and I think I do better than I used to, but I know how inadequate my words are. But I also recognize that I’ve come a long way since the first time I tried to write a tasting note, back in the early 1990s, and all I could manage was three words!

One of the difficulties in writing tasting notes is that perilous journey from the perception of wine to the words about wine. We have an impoverished lexicon for tastes and smells. We know our experience when we taste; we simply struggle to put this into words. It’s also that our perception of wine is a unity. The brain works hard to bring together the input from different senses (this is known as cross-modal processing) into a seamless, unified conscious experience, and we aren’t privy to all the behind-the-scenes calculation and blending. But when we try to capture the perception in words, we go all reductionist. We undo what the brain did, and try to separate out all the components of this unified experience of wine.

So most approaches to writing a tasting note start with the following questions. What flavours do we get? How much acidity? How much fruit? How much tannin? What sort of tannins? If you do wine exams you will take this spotting the components of wine to the extreme, and will be sitting there wondering whether the acidity is medium or medium plus, and hope that the examiner sees things the way you do.

So the question is, what is a good tasting note? In the wine trade we write them all the time. But I think we’ve become lazy, and most of them are really bad, and they could be a lot better.

I think we are capable of better, but we need to spend a bit longer considering what we write. My real complaint is not with the tasting notes that sound ridiculous, nonsensical and contrived (there are plenty of these), but with the ones that sound good but actually fail, because they fail to communicate about the wine in a meaningful way. 

First of all, there’s the perfectly good but generic note, embellished with comments about length, balance, or freshness that pretty much could apply to any wine. It’s as if tasters sometimes run out of things to say, and then pad their notes with generic terms. Secondly, there’s the situation where tasters are going through a long flight of similar wines and get scared of repetition, so they end up going for novelty simply to make the notes sound a bit different.

Third, there’s the problem of prototyping. One of the problems is that in doing wine education, or simply hanging around the wine trade long enough, we develop these templates for each variety or type of wine. The templates consist of a long list of descriptors for these wines, from which we select a short list and then some winners as we taste the wine. Whether or not there is much correspondence with what is in the glass is another issue. The note sounds great. It’s as if we have learned a code.

Novices generally spend their time assessing what is in the glass and then trying to describe that. We professionals rush much more quickly to words. We need to slow down and spend time in the actual experience of perception itself, without quickly applying the template. It is hard for us to do this, but we need to if we are to improve our tasting notes. Maybe the novices write purer notes because of this.

Of course, tasting notes are written for different purposes. There’s the marketing tasting note on the back of a bottle. Then there’s the shelf-talker in a store. There’s the wine exam tasting note. And there’s the wine critics’ tasting note that is usually supplementary to the score, and may even be cursory. But the ideal tasting note is one that can communicate the qualities of a wine to someone else who isn’t drinking that wine in an accurate fashion. It’s using words to capture a sensory experience.

I think there’s an experiment I’d like to try in order to see which notes are most effective. This would involve two people sitting across a table, with a screen dividing them. In front of each are five glasses of wine. Both have the same five wines, but in different order. The are labelled 1-5 on one side of the table, and a-e on the other side.

The job of the two tasters is to describe these wines – which have to be fairly closely matched – in such a way that they can both pair them up. This is a good test of the ability of a taster to make that connection between sensation, flavour and words: can they accurately translate their impressions of the wines into a tasting note that allows another person to recognize the wine? This is not about writing a note that sounds lovely and has verbal flourishes and flights of imagination. It’s functional, and the success can be judged by whether both people can identify which of 1-5 corresponds to a-e. For this to work, of course, requires the wines to be very similar in colour, otherwise it would be quite easy simply to use colour as the distinguishing feature (it could be done comparatively). Or colour could be ruled out as part of the description.

In the wine trade, we write tasting notes all the time. I think we can do better.